Education and awareness are critical steps towards true reconciliation. With September 30 marking National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, we’ve put together a curated selection of books, podcasts, and documentaries that provide valuable insights into Indigenous history, culture, and worldview.
These resources can help deepen our understanding on the history and lasting impacts of residential schools in Canada and spark the meaningful conversations necessary to move truth and reconciliation forward.
Moving Reconciliation Forward
We’re proud to represent and work with several prominent Indigenous leaders who are lending their voices, experiences, and stories to this vital conversation through award-winning and compelling books, podcasts, and documentaries.
Recommended Reading
The Knowing
by Tanya Talaga
Bestselling author and acclaimed journalist Tanya Talaga retells Canada’s history through an Indigenous lens in her riveting new book, The Knowing.
Deeply personal and meticulously researched, The Knowing explores Tanya’s family story, spanning decades of government- and Church-sanctioned enfranchisement and genocide. It unravels the centuries-long oppression of Indigenous Peoples and how it echoes throughout the country today.
Mind Over Matter
by Jordin Tootoo
In Mind Over Matter, Jordin Tootoo chronicles his process of healing from the suicide and violence that marks his family, only to discover the true source of trauma in his father’s secret past.
He travels to Nunavut to speak with his father and encounters the ghosts of an entire community. Weaving together life’s biggest themes, Jordin shares the kind of wisdom he specializes in — the hard-won kind.
True Reconciliation
by the Hon. Jody Wilson-Raybould
True Reconciliation answers the question that the Honourable Jody Wilson-Raybould is asked the most: What can I do to help advance reconciliation?
Broken down into three core practices — learn, understand, and act — Jody empowers readers to become the changemakers Canada needs, showing them what they need to do to break down silos constructed by colonialism and act on what our collective future requires.
The Right to Be Cold
by Sheila Watt-Cloutier
The Right to Be Cold is the culmination of Sheila Watt-Cloutier’s regional, national, and international work over the last 25 years. She passionately argues that climate change is a human rights issue in which we’re all inextricably linked.
Weaving together historical traumas and current issues, she explores the parallels between safeguarding the Arctic and the survival of not only the Inuit culture but the world.
Recommended Podcasts
Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s
In this Pulitzer Prize- and Peabody Award-winning podcast — the first podcast to win both awards in the same year — Connie Walker unearths how her family’s story fits into one of Canada’s darkest chapters: the residential school system.
Kuper Island
Hosted by Duncan McCue, this eight-part series tells the stories of four students: three who survived and one who didn’t. They attended one of the most notorious residential schools, where unsolved deaths, abuse, and lies haunt the community and survivors to this day.
Seven Truths
The Anishinaabe are guided by the Seven Grandfather Teachings — love, bravery, humility, wisdom, honesty, respect, and truth. Seven Truths explores each teaching through the eyes of Anishinaabe storyteller Tanya Talaga and the people she’s proud to know.
Recommended Documentaries
The Knowing
As a companion to her new book, The Knowing, Tanya Talaga co-directed a four-part docu-series of the same name, which follows her journey to solve an 80-year-old family mystery. Through archival footage and intimate interviews, she pieces together the unknown story of her family member, Annie Carpenter, bringing viewers on an emotional journey of familial reclamation.
Secret Path
Created in partnership between Mike Downie and his brother Gord, Secret Path is a multimedia project that tells the story of Chanie Wenjack, a 12-year-old boy who died while fleeing from his residential school. It explores a dark part of Canada’s history — the long-suppressed mistreatment of Indigenous children and families by the residential school system — in the hopes of moving reconciliation forward.
